A DOLL’S HOUSE
Almeida Theatre
★★★★
“the performances are solid and nuanced”
At one point, Nora, drowning in debt and deception, dances in a sexy nurse outfit for her husband and her best friend – two birds with one stone.
Spoiler alert: it is a profoundly unsexy moment. Nora is too freighted with distress to be a fantasy figure, the men too bovine in their strangled lusts to be enchanted.
Real life intrudes and breaks down the illusion into its humdrum parts.
Besides, Nora is too smart to surrender to the pretence. That, in miniature, is the problem she is trying to outrun: life as performance.
Anya Reiss’s update of A Doll’s House places Nora and Torvald in the upper tiers of London finance, where the money is large, the margins tight, and the optics everything.
They are on the cusp of cashing out but the deal is not yet done. Until then, they are living as if the millions are already in the bank. The house is full of Christmas credit card sprees and the mood just shy of panic.
The plot does not need much adjustment from Henrik Ibsen’s original, except that here the women are more clearly the authors of their own misfortune. Nora has committed a financial crime to keep her husband afloat through addiction and recovery. Her husband doesn’t know. It would ruin him. Nils, an employee with a precarious foothold on his own life, opts for blackmail. From there, the screws tighten in familiar ways.
Romola Garai plays ersatz yummy mummy Nora as someone always a fraction ahead of herself but gaining no advantage from the foreknowledge. She dominates the play. Her performance is agitated and magnetic, managing not just her secret but the version of herself that makes the rest of this fakery possible.
Tom Mothersdale’s Torvald is all nervous control. His authority rests on things continuing to go well. He is a man clinging to love, money and illusion with desperation rather than joy. His history of addiction is not overplayed, but it colours everything, especially his hostility to James Corrigan’s Nils. Corrigan gives Nils a sweaty directness the others often avoid. He knows what he wants and says so, where the rest sustain the lie for as long as the lie remains viable.
Reiss threads in contemporary detail. They live on their phones, sealed in a kind of high-end white bunker, with real life kept at bay. Their only connections are via Instagram. The children remain offstage, heard but not seen, and at one point Nora frets that she is simply performing motherhood via FaceTime.
Around the central pair, the performances are solid and nuanced. Thalissa Teixeira’s downbeat Kristine – the most sympathetic in a parade of slithering grotesques – offers a steadier presence and some semblance of hope. Olivier Huband’s Petter Rank, who lusts after Nora, is mostly insufferable.
Director Joe Hill-Gibbins ensures the drama builds cleanly. By the final confrontation, when Nora has no choice but to tell Torvald the truth, there is nothing left to hide behind. The resolution misfires somewhat – the tone all over the place – which leads to deflation rather than explosion.
What remains, however, is a sense of drenching anxiety. This is Snakes on a Plane for the banking set.
A DOLL’S HOUSE
Almeida Theatre
Reviewed on 9th April 2026
by Giles Broadbent
Photography by Marc Brenner
